A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that 86 percent of African-Americans disapprove of the jury verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. By contrast, 51 percent of whites say they approve of the verdict while just 31 percent disapprove. However, only 30 percent of white Democrats approve of the verdict.

Let’s give the African-American community the benefit of the doubt and assume its members didn’t pay much attention to the evidence in the case and were swayed by the early MSM coverage of the matter. Even so, the 86 percent number is staggering.

The disparity between the views of whites and blacks regarding this case is more along the lines I’d expect to see in Israel if the Martin-Zimmerman affair had involved an Israeli-Arab and a Jew, than what one might have hoped for in America. And the disparity between the views of blacks and white Republicans approaches that which I imagine might have obtained in Bosnia 20 years ago between Muslims and Bosnian Croats.

Accordingly, I’m even more sympathetic than before to President Obama’s attempt to bridge the racial gap through his remarks on Friday, as flawed as they were in some respects. But I doubt that he succeeded even slightly in bridging the gap.

By the way, the same poll finds that Hispanic Americans disapprove of the Zimmerman verdict by a 2-1 ratio. But I suppose we should believe they hold this unsupportable view only because Congress hasn’t granted amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.

JOHN adds: I suppose the obvious precedent for the Zimmerman disconnect is the O.J. Simpson trial. Remember the hand-wringing over how differently blacks and whites saw that case? It is an interesting comparison in that in the Simpson case, the African-American was the perpetrator, not the victim, yet the radical gulf in how people of different races viewed the case was the same. I would conclude that divergent reactions to the Zimmerman verdict suggest that things haven’t gotten any better on the racial front since 1995; but then, why should they have?